Spiritual Science as a Treasure for Life

Schmidt Number: S-2893

On-line since: 31st December, 2015

The
Moral Basis of Human Life

Berlin,
12 February 1914

Although in these talks I have already
spoken repeatedly about the moral life and the moral world
order, I would like to summarise what one can say from the
viewpoint of spiritual science about the bases of the moral
world order in the human life.

Schiller (Friedrich Sch.,
1759-1805, German poet) expressed the basic character of the
moral human lifein a magnificently
simple way:

Do you search the highest, the
greatest?

The plant can teach you.

What it does unconsciously

Do it volitionally — that's
it.

Just the today's discussions maybe show
that this saying applies to the basic character of the moral
life. However, it matters that in the second half of this
quotation a significant riddle is hidden: how, by which means
and where from the human being can want what the plant does
without will. You have to search the heart of all philosophical
and moral-scientific investigations in this riddle.

In our time, a big number of thinkers who
deal with the moral questions of humanity can hardly penetrate
so far to get to the undeniable fact of any ethical obligation
of the human being. We shall realise that the ethical
obligations and impulses shine into life as it were for a big
number of thinkers who cannot indicate the place based on their
worldviews characteristic for the present where from this light
of moral impulses shines into the human souls.

Just if we link to Schiller's saying, we
can note a peculiar, at first like the moral life lighting up
fact which becomes clear in particular if you descend to the
lowest realm of nature, to the mineral realm. Let us assume
that we turn our glance upon a rock crystal. The essentials,
which are not always perceptible, are that you have to do the
following requirement according to the circumstances of the
universe. If this rock crystal, if this physical thing develops
its inherent laws, it represents its being. If one were
able—and indeed the ongoing natural sciences will come to
such achievements—to state from the special substance of the
rock crystal, how its particular crystal form has to result,
the known six-sided prism, from both sides concluded by
six-sided pyramids, then you can also know if it reaches such a
crystal form how this law expresses itself in the outside
world. Then it represents its being in the outer
space.

In a sense, we can say the same of the
beings of the plant realm, maybe less of the beings of the
animal realm. However, the same law also applies in the animal
realm, even if somewhat modified, because in nature everything
only exists in certain gradations. Indeed, one would have to
say a lot if one wanted to discuss the peculiarity of this
principle. I want to suggest this only. The deeper you immerse
yourself just in this fact, the more you recognise that here
for our world order a point exists by which the human being
differs, nevertheless, radically from the other physical
beings.

Let us assume once that one could really
recognise all those principles of formation and other
principles that are inherent in a human form, as for example,
the crystal form is inherent in a rock crystal, and the human
being would express this sum of formative forces inherent to
him. Then he would not represent his being in the outer space
in the same sense as the other physical beings. Since deeply
inside the human being are the moral impulses which are
characterised at first by the fact that they cause an inner
tendency of development which does not show his being concluded
to the human being like the other physical beings if he
expresses his formative forces. I admit that I express a rather
trivial fact with it, but a fact from which one has to start,
nevertheless. Worldviews coloured more materialistically do not
acknowledge that; however, one has to acknowledge it in case of
an unprejudiced consideration of existence. One has to
acknowledge that the human being, we say, perceives something
from somewhere at first that wants to settle in his being, and
that gives him the impulse not to regard his being as a
concluded one like the other physical creatures. Yes, one could
say, as completely, as perfectly the human being could bring
his formative forces into being as the other physical creatures
do, he would never be able to declare his being as concluded
compared with the moral impulses. This is why Kant (Immanuel
K., 1724-1804), the great philosopher, felt forced to separate
his worldview in two completely different parts. He
differentiated one part that shows everything that is to be
recognised of the outside world in such a way that the human
being positions himself in this worldview with all his
formative forces. The other part projects in the human
existence as “categorical imperative:” act in such
a way that the maxim of your action could become an imperative
for all human beings. Thus, possibly the categorical imperative
could be expressed. This other part of the Kantian worldview
positions itself in the human life in such a way that it gives
the tonic for the human being. However, how does Kant
understand it? In such a way, that it speaks from another world
than from that which one grasps with the worldview of knowledge
and cognition. Therefore, he speaks about a quite different
world that Kant tries to fill with all teachings of a divine
being, of human freedom, of the immortality of the human soul
and the like. Expressly Kant means that one has to listen to
the world that is different from that of the usual human
knowledge if one wants to perceive what obliges the human
being. The categorical imperative is as it were the gate into a
world that is above the sensory world.

Thus, one realises that it is probably felt
that the being of man is not concluded with his formative
forces. In our time, something strange becomes apparent. One
would like to say, our time of the more
materialistic-mechanistic, naturalistic way of thinking cannot
at all speak—if one leaves it to its innermost impulses
strictly—of such a world of which Kant was still speaking.
Indeed, the fewest people are consequent in their worldviews.
They do not expand all basic feelings that result from the
requirements of their worldview, to the whole worldview. Those
in particular who adhere to a naturalistic-materialistically
coloured worldview—and who prefer today to be called
monists—must completely reject the possibility to look up in a
world, into which Kant looks like through a front gate with his
categorical imperative. They also do this. Not only those who
stand more or less on a scientific ground and with those it is
comprehensible, but also many people who one calls
“psychologists” do it in such a way. Numerous
psychological thinkers of the most recent past do no longer
manage asking: where from do the moral bases of human life
come, actually, and where from that what distinguishes the
human being from all other physical beings? Then the people say
without thinking, ethics must be founded on the fact that not
only the single follows those impulses that are directed
immediately to his own being, to his own existence, but also
that he follows those impulses that are directed to the whole
humanity. “Social ethics” has become a word that is
in full vogue in our present.

Because one can look up at no higher worlds
with the cognitive forces of which one disposes according to
their view, one tries to get a clue in certain border areas
with that what one can still accept as “real”: the
totality of the human beings or any group of humanity. One
calls this moral what is in the sense of this totality, in
contrast to that what the single person does only for himself.
One can find extremely irrational thoughts that want to
maintain ethics and morality under this point of view of mere
social ethics. In any case, someone who looks deeper into these
matters has just to look for the real contents of that what is
to be done, or rather for that, where from such contents can
come, for the “places,” from which the moral
impulses can originate.

In this sense, Schopenhauer (Arthur Sch.,
1788-1850) spoke a brilliant word that I have already often
quoted here: “Preaching morality is easy, founding
morality is hard.” He means with it: it is difficult to
visit the forces and impulses in the human soul that make the
human being really a moral being, it is easy to pick up certain
principles from the historical course of humanity or also from
the religious or other systems with which one can then preach
morality. Schopenhauer means that it does not depend whether
one can pronounce these or those moral principles, but what
forms the basis of the moral impulses as forces.

Now, however, Schopenhauer finds these
impulses of the human nature in compassion and empathy in his
one-sided way. One has said rightly, why should anybody who
feels morally connected with a matter which concerns only
himself and no one else, avoid a perjury that is only caused by
empathy? Why should anybody be prevented morally, for example,
from mutilating himself out of certain empathy? Briefly, and I
could bring in many such examples: indeed, the impulse
that Schopenhauer finds is very comprehensive, one meets
something that must form the basis of most moral actions which
however cannot be exhaustive at all.

It is instructive at any price that the
theories, the views, and opinions of the origin of morality
grasp at nothing the more any worldview tends only to that what
one can obtain with the outer senses and the reason that is
directed to this outer sensory world. It would take too much
time of course if I wanted to show in detail that such a
worldview is unable to state the place of origin of morality.
Nevertheless, the moral-ethical life is hanging in the air with
any such worldview that is directed only to the outer sensory
world and to the reason that combines the facts of the sensory
world or moulds them into principles.

What I have just said should lead to the
explanation of something that must appear quite natural after
the preceding talks. If one assumes in the sense of these talks
that a world of spiritual beings and spiritual facts forms the
basis of our sensory world and the world of the reason, then it
is just a given, because one cannot find the impulses of the
ethical in the sensory world, to look for these impulses in the
spiritual world. Since maybe the requirements, views, and
opinions of those are right who believe that just in the moral
something speaks into the human nature that comes immediately
from a supersensible world. Therefore, we want to approach the
consideration of the moral life. However, I will summarise for
those listeners who have heard only few of these talks quite
briefly, how the spiritual researcher ascends to the spiritual
world where we want to search the origin of
morality.

I have said the following many a time here.
If the human being wants to get beyond the realm of sensory
experience, he must not stop with his power of cognition that
the human being normally has. Any science, any consideration is
right which speaks about limits of knowledge in the sense as I
have often explained here and starts from the requirement that
the human being can develop no other cognitive forces than
those, which are in him by themselves. Nevertheless, in
spiritual research it matters that everything that is already
in the human being is developed further that forces slumbering
in the human being can be woken. Many a time I have spoken of
the methods that can develop these slumbering forces. I have
spoken of that “spiritual chemistry” which goes
forward with the same logic and rationality as natural sciences
do, but which extends to the spiritual area and its forces,
and, hence, has to develop the natural methods and the natural
way of thinking in a way different from natural sciences. In
this sense, I have often explained where spiritual science must
be a continuation of natural sciences in our time. I would like
to point to that what should be mentioned only as it were maybe
once again for clarification.

I said once that one cannot consider water
if you face it only as water that in it the hydrogen is
contained which the chemist separates by the outer chemistry.
Water extinguishes fire, it is not ignitable; hydrogen, a gas,
is ignitable and can be liquefied. Just as little you can
discover the nature of hydrogen that is combined with the
oxygen in the water, just as little you can consider the
spiritual-mental in the outer human body. However, the
spiritual chemistry does not consist in tumultuous
performances, in something that can be carried out externally
like the outer chemistry, but in the following that I would
like to show only quite briefly. You can read out the further
details in my Occult Science. An Outline or in the book
How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?.

The human being is the only tool with which
you can penetrate into the spiritual. However, he must advance
by particular soul exercises to that point where he can connect
a sense with the words: I experience myself in my
spiritual-mental beyond the physical-bodily—as the hydrogen
would have to say if it could experience itself: I experience
myself beyond the oxygen. Persevering soul exercises are
necessary to separate this spiritual-mental from the
physical-bodily, and that the human being gets around to
connecting a meaning with the words: I experience myself in the
spiritual-mental, but my physical-bodily is outside of me as
the table is outside of me. These exercises last shorter or
longer and consist in an increase of attention what is already
important in the usual life. However, I do not mean the
attention on soul contents caused by something exterior, but on
soul contents that one puts in the centre of the soul life. If
the human being is able to tense all his soul forces and then
to concentrate them upon clear soul contents of which he knows
for sure that he himself has put them, then everything is
crowded together gradually by this stronger concentration of
the soul forces that enables him to lift out the
spiritual-mental from the physical-bodily. Only the exercise of
meditation must take place regardless of practising the
so-called concentration. This is something that the human being
already knows in the usual life, but one has to increase it
unlimitedly in spiritual science: devotion to the general world
process.

The second requirement of spiritual science
is to be given away to the general world being, as a human
being is in sleep, but consciously and not unconsciously. Many
people do not experience the right success of these exercises
because they get tired of the systematic and persevering
performance of these exercises. While one gives the soul forces
another direction by such exercises than they have in the
everyday life and strains them in another way as they are
strained in the everyday life, one arrives at that strange
moment where one knows: now you experience spiritual-mentally.
However, while you made use of your brain and your senses once,
you recognise yourself beyond the body, as usually the outer
objects were outside of you. Our time will force itself to
acknowledge such a thing, as the profundities of Copernicus,
Kepler, and Galilei asserted themselves. They faced the same
out-of-date cognitive forces that the recognition of the
spiritual worlds faces today. Whereas the opponents were people
at that time who maintained old religious traditions, these are
today the so-called “freethinkers” who oppose the
recognition of the spiritual-scientific knowledge.
Nevertheless, one has to do the step to this recognition, as at
the time of Copernicus, Galilei and Giordano Bruno the step to
the outer natural sciences was done.

I have never spoken to you in abstractions
and speculations, but I have always tried to state the concrete
spiritual facts to which the human being comes if he reaches
the indicated levels of spiritual knowledge. One can experience
that the human being lifts out himself from the physical-bodily
and experiences himself in such a way that he obtains a
consciousness that differs by the experience even from any
illusion and hallucination. You experience yourself beyond your
head, and if you submerge again, it is, as if you resume using
your brain as an outer tool. This experience is stupefying if
it appears first. But one can get it as it is described in the
writingHow Does One Attain
Knowledge of Higher Worlds?.
Then one enters into a world of concrete spiritual experiences
where one is within spiritual facts as one is with the senses
and the reason in a world of concrete sensory beings and
sensory facts.

One faces this world in three levels. I
have called the first level that of the Imaginative world. This
Imaginative world is no imagined world, but a world in which
you experience the facts of the spiritual world as pictures
that actually express the processes of the spiritual world. You
have to work through this Imaginative world, so that you get to
know all sources of error gradually which are very numerous and
learn to distinguish what deceives you and what corresponds to
a real spiritual existence of beings or processes.

Then you ascend to the second level of
knowledge that I call that of Inspiration. Inspiration differs
from Imagination that with the latter you have the outer
surface of spiritual processes and beings in pictures only,
while you have now to develop what distinguishes the spiritual
perception radically from the outer perception: the fact that
you dive into the spiritual percipience. Indeed, it is in such
a way that you do not face the spiritual existence in the way
as the sensory existence: the fact that it is there—and I am
here; but, indeed, with the spiritual cognition
something takes place like diving into that what one perceives.
It sounds strange, however, it is literally true: your being
extends spatially in all things that you perceive in the
spiritual world. While you are, otherwise, at a point of space,
enclosed in your skin, and all other things are outside,
everything of the spiritual world becomes inner world what you
are otherwise used to call outer world. You live in it as far
as you are able to penetrate into it.

Then there is still a higher level of
cognition about which I do not speak today; this is the
Intuition, in the right sense understood, not that which is
called in the usual sense. One works the way up through
Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition into the spiritual
world.

The following question should now occupy
us. If one leaves the body and the usual experiences of
existence, which difference is there between the outer
knowledge and the moral impulses, ideas and mental pictures?
Are we able to point to a source of the moral life if we can
maybe indicate this source in that world which one reaches if
one leaves the usual sensory world and penetrates with the own
spiritual knowledge into a spiritual world?

We consider the world at first that raises
a spiritual imagery around us. I simply tell the facts as they
arise for the spiritual observation. There one experiences, if
one leaves the sense-perceptible world, a kind of darkness
spreading about this world, and a new world of spiritual beings
and facts appears in which one is also in sleep, otherwise; but
as a spiritual researcher one dives consciously in this world.
While one dives in it that way, one notices: what you see as
colours, what you hear as tones in the sensory world, all that
disappears; what you can take with you in the spiritual world
is only a memory of it; something that one can imagine at most.
If this disappears, one dives in such a way that the mental
activity, the imagining activity, and the feeling activity is
seized by other beings as it were into which one
dives.

For the essentials are that you dive in the
spiritual world, in a world of beings. As soon as you dive in
the spiritual world, you find concrete facts and beings; and
what you observe in the sensory world appears actually in such
a way that you live in the extrasensory, invisible, spiritual
world; but if we are enclosed in the body, this extrasensory
world shows its reflection by the activity of our body. Indeed,
it becomes a concrete fact that the complete outer world is a
reflection of the spiritual world of which I have explained
that it causes the cerebral processes first which produce the
reflecting apparatus by which the outer processes are
perceived, and which one cannot perceive. As the human being
does not perceive himself if he looks into a mirror, but
perceives the reflection, he sees the reflection of the
spiritual world if he submerges in the physical world, while by
the processes of the body the spiritual world is reflected on
the reflecting apparatus. Then you notice that the physical
world of perception relates to the spiritual world as the
reflection relates to the viewer. Indeed, it is in such a way:
as the reflection has a meaning only for the viewer if he looks
into the mirror who takes up the picture in his soul, the
reflection of the spiritual world, the whole physical world of
perception has a meaning as a “picture”—apart
from the physical process, which is behind it. You notice this
if you enter into the spiritual world.

I do not want to establish a teleological
view of nature here. I do not mean that the world is arranged
by an infinite reason in such a way that the human being can
find the possibility to develop his self. However, I simply
want to point to the fact that now the human being can carry on
what he takes in his self if he has seen it in the outside
world, if he has received it in his soul. This whole world of
knowledge is built up by a process of reflection, and what
disappears as a process of reflection if you dive in the
spiritual world about that you know that it belongs to you, and
that is taken from it which is only a reflection in the
physical world.

These are the essentials that you get to
know when you say farewell from the sensory world and ascend to
a spiritual world: only the reflection is added to that what
you yourself are what would not be there without you, and to
which you yourself belong which has come about only because you
are a human organism. This reflection has a meaning for your
self, for that what you carry as a spiritual-mental core
through the times. Hence, you are, as soon as you are in the
spiritual world, in a world that is there without you from
which you learn to recognise that it must be reflected, so that
we can perceive it. Nevertheless, the being itself is not
contained in the reflections.

We look at that moment when we enter into
the Imaginative world. What about the moral ideas if we ascend
to the spiritual world?

The moral impulses present themselves in
the Imaginative world in such a way that you must say to
yourself, nevertheless, there you have produced something;
there you have put something in the spiritual world. What you
recognise you have not put in a world, you have put this only
in yourself and you carry it on through the times. What
corresponds to a moral impulse, a moral action, or even only to
a moral volition is creative; so that you must say if you look
at it in the spiritual world: with that which we experience
with the idea of the ethical in ourselves, we create beings in
the spiritual world. We are the originators of processes at
first, then of beings of the spiritual world.

You know that spiritual science speaks of
the repeated lives on earth. The life on earth that we
experience now is built on consecutive former lives on earth,
and always after a life on earth, a life in a spiritual
existence follows; and from our present life on earth, we look
again at the coming ones.

Our moral experience objectifies itself
literally, at first as spiritual processes. How I think and act
morally, I notice this in the spiritual world as processes.
These processes come out from the self of the human being.
While one carries on the cognitive experiences with the self
into the following lives on earth, that which belongs to the
moral or to the immoral life, is put as processes in the world
and works on as those, so that we deal again with them because
of the karma in the next life on earth. Someone who ascends to
the spiritual worlds notices how the moral impulses have a
certain relationship to his self.

We take, for example, one of the principal
impulses that the significant psychologist Franz Brentano
(1836-1917) called the only impulse of the moral world order,
the impulse of love. Who would deny that countless things go
forward in the moral life from the different levels of
love—from the lowest level of love up to the highest levels,
up to Spinoza's (Baruch S., 1632-1677) love, amor Dei
intellectualis. Everything that happens under the impulse of
love what we count among the field of moral—how do we find it in
the Imaginative world? We find everything familiar that
originates under this impulse, so that we may say, we can live
with that what originates under the impulse of love in the
spiritual world.

One feels at home with that which arises
from the capability of love, in the spiritual world. These are
the essentials, as soon as one enters into the Imaginative
world.

However, let us take what arises from
hatred what presents itself as an action or only as an
intention which hatred dictates. There the very remarkable fact
appears that everything that flows from the field of hatred
appears in the Imaginative world in such a way, that it instils
fear and repels. Yes, it belongs to the tragic sides of the
experience of the spiritual researcher that he must see himself
how he is put in the spiritual world with the forces of
sympathy and antipathy. Anyway, as soon as you enter into the
spiritual world, it can be that you feel sympathetic or
antipathic about yourself. In the physical world, it does not
happen that the human beings regard themselves as
antipathic,—as sympathetic, may be. However, in the
spiritual world one is subjected, like here to the physical
laws, to the spiritual laws. Everything that you accomplish
from the capability of love and sacrifice, from a moral impulse
or that you feel as a moral attitude all that founds processes,
which you behold Imaginatively, in such a way that you are
allowed to be likeable to yourself because of your loving
thinking, acting or feeling. Everything that is undertaken, for
example, with hatred or similar impulses, with malice, vanity
and the like, appears in the Imaginative world in such a
way that one knows: you are the creator of these processes that
are simply the objectification of your hateful or mischievous
impulses. You perceive yourself within it in such a way that
the processes compel you that you are antipathic about
yourself. There we have no other choice but to be antipathic to
ourselves.

It is necessary for a spiritual researcher
to learn to endure such situations in certain cases in a
thorough self-knowledge, and to learn to endure in patience how
they appear in the further karma. I do not really want to say
that a spiritual researcher should not have such antipathy, but
that he should not have the intention to place himself as a
saint or as a higher human being. He must strive rather to
improve his moral life so that the tragic of this antipathic
self-feeling takes place in a decreased measure. Since it means
a condition of the most dreadful tension that one wants to
escape from oneself; and this feeling appears only while
ascending to the spiritual world. There one realises where from
the impulses come by which we do the likeable and learn to
avoid what we hate. Since what one does in the usual world from
such impulses has an effect in the spiritual world as a force.
Yes, one may say, when the human being falls asleep, the forces
work on which I have just characterised. They have a strong
effect on sleep and cause the health of sleep, at least partly.
What arises like a result from the day life, and what does not
allow the human beings to fall asleep this is at the same time
what the spiritual researcher must behold.

We ask ourselves now, where from do those
moral impulses come which speak in the human soul?

In the usual life, one does not know where
from they speak. However, they are there and speak in such a
way that someone who uses the reason only which combines the
facts of the sensory world and establishes laws cannot find
them. Where from does that come what speaks into the human
being like from another world?

It is there just as knowledge only if one
beholds it in the Imaginative world. However, it works as dark
forces whose origin remains dark for cognition, which, however,
speak as impulses into the soul. The effects of that what the
spiritual researcher beholds are experienced in the sensory
world as moral impulses; the causes are in the spiritual world.
Hence, the human being appears as a being who must always say
to himself, if your power of love is completely developed ever
so much, you belong to a spiritual world and you find the other
part of your being where you acquire that what expresses itself
as moral life here, for example, in the conscience. Conscience
is a very big riddle if one wants to be consistent.

We have now found where the forces are
rooted which exist as conscience and the like. Let us assume
that we face a person and the particular configuration of our
image life causes us to hate him. What could induce us to hate
him, what we would fear in the spiritual world as processes,
this voice speaks in our soul, you shall not hate! What has an
effect on the capability of love, by which we may be likeable
to ourselves in the spiritual world, speaks into the life on
earth, you shall love. Thus, it is with the other phenomena of
moral life that crystallise spiritually as
conscience.

How does this conscience appear as a fact
in the spiritual world?

You do not yet find it as a fact in the
Imaginative world. You must dive into the Inspirative
world—must dive in such a way that you feel poured out about
the whole field of perception in the spiritual and this inner
perception as your field of perception that you experience in
yourself. The origin of conscience speaks down from there. It
expresses itself only as it were in that what one can
experience in the Imaginative world, however, its centre is in
the Inspirative world. If you rise into it and try once by way
of trial to ask yourself, what happens if you refrain from all
that what the voice of your conscience says to you? Let us
assume once by way of trial that you could do something good as
you do something out of hatred, and let us assume that your
conscience does not speak,—you would notice
that something happens that I want to make clear at first by a
comparison.

You experience something like a drop of
water in yourself that evaporates on a hot place immediately.
Such a thing happens if by way of trial the conscience wants to
extinguish itself in the Imaginative world. There you
experience that you lose the centre of gravity as it were; you
are no longer able to orientate yourself in the spiritual
world. It belongs to the most dreadful experiences that you
have then to be in the spiritual world and to feel the
consciousness dwindling, after you have trained yourself first
to carry consciousness into this world. It is a dreadful
condition if unscrupulous human beings have experiences there,
when they arrive at the spiritual world. Since let us assume
that a person who is not very conscientious, otherwise, comes
to the spiritual world. Everybody can carry out the exercises,
which I have described in the writingHow Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher
Worlds?if he carries out them
with the necessary energy, so that he perceives then in the
spiritual world. One should not have come to it, as long as it
is not salutary. Hence, such exercises with which one does not
lose the consciousness are also recommended in the mentioned
book, which make a person moral, so that his consciousness is
not extinguished in the spiritual world.

However, let us assume that an unscrupulous
person reaches the spiritual world. Then his consciousness
would dissolve immediately, would evaporate. There are such
unconscionable spiritual researchers absolutely. They feel the
urge immediately to hand over themselves to other spiritual
beings because we enter there into a sphere of beings. The
unscrupulous human beings who come so far where conscience
gives us a firm centre of gravity feel their consciousness
there evaporating as it were, give in to another being, make
themselves obsessed by another being in order to find purchase
on it. One can make this experience. Hence, such a person if he
returns to the day consciousness does no longer announce what
he has experienced in the spiritual world, but that what a
being is speaking through him by which he has made himself
obsessed. The integrity of our being is here maintained, while
we really carry that voice as a force in us into the
Inspirative world, which exists here as conscience. Then you
feel in yourself, but in such a way that that what you produce
what appears already in the Imaginative world exists that you
do not lose the centre of gravity and that it is something that
hold and carries you. What can hold and carry the human being
in his true spiritual being in the spiritual world speaks
through two worlds down, through the Imaginative world, down to
the sensory world, and this is the voice of
conscience.

Thus, conscience is something whose origin
many thinkers cannot discover really about which they think
that it developed only by the social order,—and that is carried
down from the spiritual world that is effective in the
sensorily experiencing human being and whose origin is found in
the spiritual world. You can find the mysteries of the whole
world only if you really develop those cognitive forces about
which I have often spoken here. Then you must say in particular
about the world of moral that it sends down its impulses from
the spiritual realms, and that the human being if he becomes
aware of the moral impulses experiences the effect of that
which has its origin in the spiritual world. If you figure the
normal world order out correctly, you realise that on one side
that spiritual worlds speak through the soul, on the other
side, however, also that one creates realities with the moral
impulses that continue working, which one finds again. We send
these realities to the spiritual world; they are causes in this
world. They form the basis of the sensory world.

I could only suggest—while I have not
mentioned a wide field of many intermediate stages—what the
spiritual researcher has to experience if he ascends from the
sensory world to the spiritual worlds. Nevertheless, I would
like to add something else. What we see originating that way,
while we act morally or immorally what expresses itself in its
effects in our moral impulses what we perceive as formative or
destructive forces in the Imaginative world appears as the
first causes of the world existence generally. We turn our look
to the universe where security, order and harmony prevail and
we look back at primeval times in which beings were active in a
similar way as we are today, where beings sent their moral
impulses out which appear so unimportant and as nothing beside
the whole world existence. However, these moral impulses grow
more and more in time! The moral impulses that originated in
primeval times from these beings grew more and more and became
the natural forces. One learns to recognise—I have to skip
intermediate stages—if one regards the astronomical laws that
fulfilled Kepler with such devoutness: the fact that in the
universe old and ripe, originally moral impulses are working.
Those who became leaders in ancient times had to exceed certain
levels—we know from previous talks that one cannot ascend in
the same way, as one ascended once in the mysteries to the
spiritual worlds, this has to happen in another way
today.

One of these highest degrees enabled the
soul to behold into the lofty realms of spiritual existence.
One called this degree the degree of the sun hero or the sun
man. Why sun hero? Because such a soul must have developed the
inner life so far that it is not exposed to the inner
arbitrariness when it rises in the realms of cognition to which
the usual soul life is exposed, but to such impulses which work
with internally recognised and experienced necessity. Then you
can say to yourself, if you deviated from them, you would cause
such a mess as the sun would cause in the universe if it
deviated from its way even for a while only. Because one had to
attain such firmness of the inner life on such a degree of
cognition, one called such recognizers sun men in the ancient
mysteries. That pointed to the connection of that what we send
out into the world and what grows out of it,—as well
as the “laws of the universe” have grown out of
moral impulses from beings of distant, distant
times.

If you consider this, you begin
experiencing a sentence by Kant somewhat different. When he
contemplated the moral duty, the moral consciousness generally
he pronounced the meaningful words: “Two things fill the
mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and
the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the
starry heaven above me and the moral law within
me”(Critique of Practical
Reason). Such connections, which
one experiences, which one surveys where one sees the moral law
working in time, filled him when he spoke of the “starry
heaven above me and the moral law within me.” Someone who
recognises the ancient impulses of moral life
spiritual-scientifically recognises at the same time how this
moral life is connected with the true source of the human
being. Hence, spiritual science can give a firm base of this
moral life. So one can almost say: yes, any knowledge is there
to find ourselves in our inside and to carry what we find in
such a way through the world and the times; however, everything
that we experience as moral impulses in ourselves makes us
creators, co-creators of the world. We can understand how we
must despise ourselves as immoral human beings who bring
downfall and destruction into the world if we recognise that we
are connected by the moral world order more really with the
world than by the other knowledge that we take up in our
reason. Then you feel what such deep spirits felt like Johann
Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) whose 100th day of
death we recently celebrated. He says, what is the sensory
world? It has no independent, inherent reasonable existence; it
is only the sensualised material for duty, for the moral world
order. What spiritual science has to bring to light such a deep
spirit as Fichte anticipated it concerning the moral worldview
who looked at the world in such a way that he said, the moral
world order is the most real, and the other is there only that
we have a material in which we can express the moral
impulses.

Of course, spiritual science cannot
position itself on the ground of Fichte's worldview, because it
is one-sided. It comes from a time in which spiritual science
did not yet exist. Nevertheless, one can see with admiration
how Fichte experienced the moral world order in himself. Since
spiritual science just shows that all the other knowledge
presents itself as a world tableau; however, moral is that what
we must be if we want to develop our whole being. This does not
only fasten us in ourselves, but positions us with real balance
in the whole world order. If one realises in such a way that
just spiritual science can find the living support of the moral
world order, then one clearly understands what I have already
often pronounced in these talks. However, one is with the
modern spiritual science in such situation even today, as for
example once Giordano Bruno was before his contemporaries when
he wanted to extend the worldview to the blue vault of heaven
in infinite widths of space. He had to show to the human beings
of his time: what you perceive as the blue vault of heaven is
only the borders of your narrow view. Such a spiritual
phantasmagoria is that what the human being has put in his
existence by birth or conception and death. However, as the
blue vault of heaven is only the narrow border of our own view
in space, birth and death are only the borders for the human
view in time. As well as that which the human being set to
himself as the borders of space was recognised as Maya, the
borders beyond birth and death open up for the human soul, and
the infinite worlds are acknowledged which are beyond birth and
death.

Today we stand there with the
spiritual-scientific information in our time in such a way as
the modern natural sciences stood with their views in the
aurora of our time. However, one still stands alone in a way.
One stands there in such a way that one has the insurmountable
confidence of truth that searches its way through the narrowest
scratches and rock crevices, even if the opponent powers want
to fight against it. One feels isolated, nevertheless, with
spiritual science. One feels the modern time interfering into
spiritual science how the souls must demand it,—and one
feels in harmony with that what the most significant spirits of
all times anticipated and thought what they have often
pronounced more simply than one must pronounce it today what
they properly pronounced nevertheless from their souls, feeling
the truth. Thus, one feels in harmony with many spirits, while
one has to point from spiritual science to the true sources of
the moral life and moral world order coming from the
divine-spiritual worlds. One feels also in harmony with a
sentence by Goethe I would like to quote which summarises what
I have said in the course of this talk. Goethe said a
significant word for that who can feel the moral life really:
wholly quietly, a God speaks in our breast, wholly quietly, but
also clearly; he makes us recognise what we have to grasp and
what we have to avoid(fromTorquato Tasso). While Goethe says: wholly quietly, but also clearly a
God speaks, he points as it were anticipating to that what
spiritual science can find as the impulses of the moral life in
the spiritual world.

We look up at the spiritual world, and we
say to ourselves, just the moral life testifies that the human
being has his origin in the spiritual worlds; since from there
the God announces quietly but also quite clearly what we have
to grasp and what we have to avoid. Indeed, he covers what the
spiritual researcher beholds as the reasons of both, but what
the human being expresses in moral impulses. That has its true
primal grounds in the spiritual world, what dives from it into
our soul, what speaks in the human soul as a real God, as God's
voice from the spiritual world, announcing the nature of the
human being by which he reaches beyond that what his fellow
creatures are in the universe.